Why is the academic novel my favourite literary genre? Maybe it's just narcissistic pleasure. One theory about the rise of the novel argues that it developed because readers like to read about their own world, and indeed about themselves.

And yes, I am a professor of English literature, and yes, I have been a character in academic fiction at least twice, once a voluptuous, promiscuous, drug-addicted bohemian, once a prudish, dumpy, judgmental frump. I hope I am not too easily identified in either of these guises, and I'm not about to disclose the novels here, although I can tell you that I preferred being cast as the luscious Concord grape to my role as the withered prune.

Long before I was a professor, however, I was addicted to reading academic novels, whose popularity coincided with my own adolescence. The genre has arisen and flourished only since about 1950, when post-war universities were growing rapidly, first to absorb the returning veterans, and then to take in a larger and larger percentage of the baby-booming population. The nature of higher education in America and Britain had a lot to do with it too. Most of our universities act in loco parentis for students, creating a complete society on the campus, with housing, meals, medical care, and social life all provided communally and institutionally.

They actively foster close personal relations between students and faculty. Moreover, the curriculum usually includes a programme in creative writing; as a result, most faculties include a few professional writers who can observe the tribal rites of their colleagues from an insider's perspective.

Of course, students have long been important characters in fiction; coming-of-age narratives and Bildungsromane have been numerous from early days. To me, however, the most interesting academic novels are about the faculty, the lifers - what one critic has called the Professorroman

In the 1960s, as a first-generation college graduate, I took an immigrant's passionate ethnographic interest in their details of academic manners. They filled a novice's need to fit into a culture, and I found answers, of a sort, to many of my questions and even to questions I hadn't formed. And decade by decade, as I became a professor myself and experienced the realities and diversities of colleges and universities, I measured the gap between what I lived and what I read.

In an era before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty in specialist publications, novels taught me how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, succeed, or fail. Now that I have retired, I read them less personally, but with more affection and empathy.

The academic novel is by now a small but recognisable sub-genre of contemporary fiction and has a small body of criticism devoted to it. Most critics hold that it is basically satirical. According to Sanford Pinsker, in Who Cares If Roger Ackroyd Gets Tenure?, "the general form is as old as Aristophanes' The Clouds. There, Socrates was held up to ridicule as a man riding through the heavens in a basket; and the label of dreamy impracticality stuck not only to him, but also to all the befuddled academic types who have followed."

Many academic novels are wildly funny, and lines from them have sustained me in hard times, from Lucky Jim's description of his ghastly little spider hole of a thesis as "this strangely-neglected topic" to the jokes in James Hynes's The Lecturer's Tale

Yet strangely enough, what appeals to me most in academic fiction is its seriousness, even sadness. Perhaps we professors turn to satire because academic life has so much pain, so many lives wasted or destroyed. On the spelling corrector on my computer, when I click on English, the alternative that comes up is anguish. Like the suburbs, the campus can be the site of pastoral, or the fantasy of pastoral - the refuge, the ivory tower. But also like the suburbs, it is the site of those perennials of the literary imagination John Updike names as "discontent, conflict, waste, sorrow, fear".

The sociologist Ian Carter says that academic novels are all predictable and indeed are mind-bogglingly repetitive: "I would pick up a novel newly discovered in a library stack or decayed second-hand bookshop," he writes. "It could belong to one of many genres; comedy of manners, thriller, whodunit, romance. After a couple of pages I would discover the awful truth. I had read it before. After a couple of years, I had read them all before."

But Carter embarked on his reading of academic fiction out of annoyance with Malcolm Bradbury's portrayal of sociologists in The History Man. For English professors, this repetitiveness also means that the novels operate on a set of conventions, themes, tropes, and values. Having read all the novels before gives us some distance on their narrative strategies and turns easy identification into something more intellectual.

Like other closed societies, the campus can function as a microcosm, according to Jay Parini, "a place where humanity plays out its obsessions and discovers what makes life bearable". Steven Connor elaborates: "The university is a closed world, with its own norms and values, which is thick with the possibilities of intrigue. Indeed, the very restriction of elements in the academic world, with the stock characters, with their cosily familiar routines of evasion and abstraction and their conspicuous, if always insecure, hierarchical structures, and the well-established situations and plot-lines, seem to generate a sense of permutative abundance." Connor sees two basic plots in academic fiction: "The one concerns the disruption of a closed world, and the gradual return of order and regularity to it, while the other concerns the passage through this closed world of a character who must in the end be allowed to escape its gravitational pull."

Janice Rossen thinks that the university novel is mainly about power, inclusion and exclusion. "Like their counterparts in any other profession, academics delight in reinforcing this view of themselves as comprising circles which are closed to the uninitiated. They also tend to compete with each other within that realm for positions of power. Academic fiction almost always takes this competitiveness as part of its basis." Novels pull together "several disparate but related threads: the influence of the power structure within academe and in relation to the world outside, the constant dialectic between competitiveness and idealism - or, scholarship as a means to an end or as an end in itself - and the implications for the creative process of the novelist's choice of such a potentially limiting and problematic subject." And overall, "the more conflicting cross-currents a novelist is able to incorporate and contrast in a given work, the better the novel".

Those formulas seem rather cut-and-dried to me. The best academic novels experiment and play with the genre of fiction itself, comment on contemporary issues, satirise professorial stereotypes and educational trends, and convey the pain of intellectuals called upon to measure themselves against each other and against their internalised expectations of brilliance. Sanford Pinsker, who is American, thinks all English professors are frustrated novelists, attracted to fiction as a neat payback and a fast buck: "Which self-respecting lit professor hasn't thought - either out loud or in private - about knocking off a tale of the assorted troubles at his or her version of Eyesore U? After all, the formula seems simple enough: plant a sensitive young professor in a garden of academic vipers, add a fetching student here and a soused administrator there, and voilà, yet another novel about higher education on the ropes."

But Connor, who is British, writes with more circumspection that the real attraction of the Professorroman to readers and writers is its double audience of insiders and outsiders: "The fact that most campus novels tend to be about English teachers or students ... is of course not very surprising even given the hostility to traffic or fraternisation between the critical and creative realms characteristic of the teaching of English literature since the war. What is less often remarked is what this implies about the addressivity of such novels, which is to say their sense of their readership and the different attitudes to it that they may have."

I'm not exactly sure what Connor means by addressivity. Certainly British academic novelists have gone further than Americans in experimenting with double narratives and clever literary allusions. But I suppose one less exalted implication of the "addressivity" of the English-professor novel could be the insider's gossipy pleasure in recognising portraits, usually unflattering, of colleagues and friends. I think I may recognise a few in the pages of recent books I have enjoyed, but who among us can be sure we are immune from such treatment? Are we smiling at the display of fruits, not noticing that we ourselves are the desiccated prune or the overripe grape? Moreover, because we professors now live in the age of celebrity, publicity and fame, being a character in a satiric academic novel, even a nasty one, may be a kind of distinction.

Stanley Fish likes being identified with David Lodge's Morris Zapp; Laurie Taylor didn't mind being falsely thought to be the original History Man; and when Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar wrote a parody of the academic world called Masterpiece Theater, more people were offended because they were excluded than because they were mocked.

The academic novel proper doesn't start until the 1950s, but there are 19th-century precursors. Anthony Trollope's comic masterpiece Barchester Towers (1857) is the great ur-narrative of academic politics, even if it is about the bickering of provincial Anglican clergy over preferment and evangelical reform. Trollope's wrangling, rivalrous Victorian clerics remind me of contemporary academics, with assistant professors, deans, and provosts standing in for curates, deacons, and bishops; and many authors of academic fiction, from CP Snow on, have been Trollope scholars. If I ever write an academic novel myself, it will be called "Barchester University".

The supreme academic fiction remains Middlemarch (1872), and Eliot's Mr Casaubon is the most haunting spectre of the academic as grim pedagogue, the scholar as the spirit of all that is sterile, cold and dark. Casaubon has no small talk, but only a large, sad, musty talk of dead things. "I live too much with the dead," he says of himself.

His pleasures are of "the severer kind"; his house, Lowick, has "an air of autumnal decline"; his smile is like "pale wintry sunshine"; he looks like "a death's head skinned over for the occasion". And yet Eliot has sympathy for "the despair which sometimes threatened him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to the goal". Casaubon uses all his meagre energy in sustaining his self-esteem, in defending himself against the realisation that his life's work of synthesis and theory, which Eliot in a stroke of prophetic insight titles the "Key to All Mythologies," is a hollow sham and that his "hard intellectual labours" have led only to "a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing".

"Achieved nothing": it's every scholar's most feared epitaph. When I entered the academic profession, in the early years of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s, feminist academics read Middlemarch as a book about female ardour and longing for the epic life and then announced themselves disillusioned by Eliot's compromises of her heroine Dorothea's ambition. "As I have moved away from what I now believe was an adolescent fantasy concerning the contents and implications of Middlemarch to what I hope is a more true understanding of the text's attitudes toward woman," wrote Lee Edwards in 1972, "I see that it can no longer be one of the books of my life." On the contrary, with every year that has passed since I got my PhD, Middlemarch has become more the canonical book of my academic life, the most eloquent of academic tragedies.

Another novel along the same lines, one that must have been influenced by Eliot, is Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925). Cather too writes about the midlife crisis of a male academic, Godfrey St Peter, burned-out although he is only 52. Unlike Casaubon, St Peter is a historian, whose life's work, an eight-volume study of the Spanish adventurers in North America, has won him acclaim, even the Oxford prize for history. But the meaning seems to have gone out of his life and his teaching; at the novel's conclusion, he is resigning himself to spending the remains of his days without delight: "Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may even be pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that."

Pretty dire introductions to the life of the mind, or at least the male life of the mind as seen by women novelists - the sacrifice of love to intellectual labour, the shrivelling of unused emotions, the steady encroachment of a tumorous vanity. Its antitheses are not in great novels like these, but in popular fiction. Luckily I also read Dorothy L Sayers's Gaudy Night (1936), set in Shrewsbury, a version of her own Oxford college, Somerville, revisited by her fictional detective Harriet Vane. Here, although there is vanity, greed, hypocrisy and even murder in the female community of the college, the female dons are absorbed by their work and still alive to more worldly pleasures, including gossip, fashion, food, and drink. To be sure, the first one of them we hear is "a grizzled woman don crossing the turf with vague eyes, her thoughts riveted upon aspects of sixteenth- century philosophy, her sleeves floating" like some academic angel.

But most of the women dons are brisk and open-minded in their interests. "We're not nearly such dried-up mummies as you think," the bright-eyed dean tells Harriet, echoing a description of Casaubon in Middlemarch: "He is no better than a mummy!" However sexless, arid, and withered the male academic may be, Sayers proves that the female academic does not have to copy him.

When English professors write novels, they tend to write about what they know best: other people's books. Even in some of the most celebrated and familiar academic satires, rewriting literary conventions is as important as mocking campus attitudes. Many of the best and most successful academic novels of the past 50 years have been rewritings of Victorian novels. In Nice Work, David Lodge rewrote the genre of the English industrial novel, particularly Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, to describe the tensions between the modern university and the world of business. Gail Godwin based her academic novel The Odd Woman on Gissing's masterpiece about Victorian feminism, The Odd Women. Joanne Dobson's wonderful series about feminist professor Karen Pelletier is based on the 19th-century American women's novels Dobson has written about as a scholar.

Novels about professors are set in academic time, which is organised and compartmentalised according to various grids and calendars, vacations and rituals. Some of the characters have names that allude to that system, such as Annie Callendar in The History Man

For academics, autumn is the beginning. "Despite the challenges of teaching," writes Jay Parini, "it's hard not to like a job where you can start over every September, shredding the previous year's failures and tossing them out the window like so much confetti." Time seems to stand still: "The slate is theoretically wiped clean in September, and one is given a fresh packet of chalk. The clock is rewound, and the faces before one never seem to age (except in faculty meetings, where only those who never question anything are without deep lines in their foreheads)." Yet the renewal of fall seems unnatural: "The rhythm of education runs counter to natural grieving. According to the academic calendar, fall means starting over, springing into life after the torpid drowse of summer. There is, indeed, a vague sense of dislocation as classes begin and as the first faculty meetings occur against a backdrop of whirling leaves and days that seem woefully tinged at dusk."

Novelists play on the ironic ambiguities of that autumnal start. Malcolm Bradbury begins The History Man with a report on the season:

"Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. The recess of summer is over, when holidays are taken, newspapers shrink, history itself seems momentarily to falter and stop. But the papers are thickening and filling again; things seem to be happening; back from Corfu and Sète, Positano and Leningrad, the people are parking their cars and campers in their drives and opening their diaries, and calling up other people on the telephone ... The new autumn colours are in the boutiques; there is now on the market a fresh intra-uterine device, reckoned to be ninety-nine per cent safe. Everywhere there are new developments, new indignities; the intelligent people survey the autumn world, and liberal and radical hackles rise, and fresh faces are about, and the sun shines fitfully, and the telephones ring."

Winter in the university is different from winter elsewhere. Although it is a time of darkness, it also a time of respite and escape. In The History Man: "and now it is the winter again; the people, having come back, are going away again. The autumn, in which the passions rise, the tensions mount, the strikes accumulate, the newspapers fill with disaster, is over. Christmas is coming; the goose is getting fat, and the papers getting thin; things are stopping happening. In the drives, the cars are being packed, and the people are ready, in relief to be off, to Positano or the Public Record Office, Moscow or mother, for the lapse of the festive season."

In a certain kind of British, or Anglophile, academic novel, such as Snow's The Masters, Byatt's Possession, or Donna Tartt's The Secret History, winter is a time of heightened privacy, inwardness, even eroticism. The Masters begins with a sensuous celebration of the pleasures of winter and solitary study (perhaps a novelist named Snow felt a natural affinity for the season):

"The snow had only just stopped, and in the court below my rooms all sounds were dulled ... It was scorchingly hot in front of the fire, and warm, cosy, shielded, in the zone of the two armchairs and the sofa which formed an island of comfort round the fireplace. Outside that zone, as one went towards the walls of the lofty medieval room, the draughts were bitter ... so that, on a night like this, one came to treat most of the room as the open air, and hurried back to the cosy island in front of the fireplace, the pool of light from the reading lamp on the mantelpiece, the radiance which was more pleasant because of the cold air which one has just escaped."

It's an apt metaphor for the scholar's life.

But in spring, especially in American universities, this cosy exile is invaded, and there is trouble brewing for the faculty from the administration and the students.

The administration is plotting: "April is the month of heightened paranoia for academics," writes Richard Russo, "not that their normal paranoia is insufficient to ruin a perfectly fine day in any season. But April is always the worst. Whatever dirt will be done to us is always planned in April, then executed over the summer, when we are dispersed."

The students are protesting, as Mary McCarthy explains: "The whole campus was, as usual, unsettled by the vernal influence and the prospect of Easter vacation: hitherto well-satisfied students came before the department wanting to change their major or their tutor and were dissuaded with the greatest difficulty: room-mates broke up; love affairs were blighted; girls wept in the wash-room; Miss Rejnev's Russian literature class sent her a petition that they had had enough of Dostoevsky."

The transition from spring to summer brings commencement exercises and class reunions; their juxtaposition must make the meanest professorial intellect reflect on time and mortality. At Princeton, the highlight of annual class reunions, which take place in early summer, just before graduation, is called the P-rade. Reunion classes march through the campus, dressed in orange and black blazers of different patterns, or orange and black costumes suggesting the cultural or political themes of their graduation year - spacemen, soldiers, Arabs, hippies. They march in order of age, from the oldest to the youngest; at the head of the procession are the oldest living members of the class of whatever, riding in electric cars, gallantly waving to the cheering spectators. The procession is a hallowed literary metaphor, but this one is especially resonant, like the mummers on the horizon of Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Behind the cheering alumni and the antique autos, I always imagine, should be death's winged chariot, with a tall figure in an orange and black hooded robe carrying a scythe.

Academic novels are rarely in sync with their decade of publication; most reflect the preceding decade's issues, crises, and changes. But in general, reading academic novels from 1950 to the present gives a good overview of the way the academy and its scribes have moved from hope to endurance to anticipation to cynicism and around to hope again.

· Edited from Elaine Showalter's introduction to her book Faculty Towers: the Academic Novel and its Discontents, published this month by Oxford University Press, price £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0870.